Organizations around the world are increasingly at risk of suffering security incidents which can have severe consequences to their business operations and reputation. For example, an intrusion into an organization's network by an attacker that leads to a data breach may cause a decline in revenues and customers, a damaged reputation, and a host of other potential problems. As a first layer of defense, it is important to ensure that machines directly accessible from the public Internet, such as servers, are properly configured and secured. If organizations fail to protect their external (i.e., Internet-facing) network infrastructure, that infrastructure may create an easy point of entry for any attacker to penetrate the organization's internal network and further access and compromise other internal machines. As part of the reconnaissance phase of an attack against an organization, attackers may perform a software vulnerability assessment of the external infrastructure of the organization. Attackers may then leverage any vulnerabilities found to exploit the vulnerable machine, launch an attack on the organization's internal network, and access sensitive data.
Unfortunately, ensuring that every service executing on every public-facing server deployed by an organization is up-to-date and secure may be a difficult task for organizations with many servers. Traditional methods for detecting vulnerabilities on servers may be resource-intensive or inaccurate. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for detecting vulnerabilities on servers.